


Blackbird

by Kypros



Category: The Outsiders - S. E. Hinton
Genre: Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 19:00:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2784128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kypros/pseuds/Kypros
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darrel Curtis is twenty-two and living with unfulfilled dreams and fingers yellowed from too, too many cigarettes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blackbird

Darrel Curtis is twenty-two and living with unfulfilled dreams and fingers yellowed from too, too many cigarettes.

He sips a beer, the frothy lager warm from sitting out on the counter. 

He is older now, but that doesn’t matter. Things like love and family had come and gone but they were no longer special in the ways that they should be. Because there was a time before the accident – before car crashes and stomach sick senses brought from smells like burnt rubber and seared flesh scrapped across the causeway on the 407 that reminded him that he used to have a life. Something other than working two jobs and paying bills and trying his hardest to keep that damn Ponyboy out of trouble.

Sodapop laughs and cracks another beer. Darry’s thoughts are hidden behind a smile. He looks around – sees a kitchen full of dirty dishes and a floor that is in desperate need of a mop. 

Today – tonight— is his twenty-second birthday. 

Tonight is supposed to be about celebrating growing old by getting drunk and pretending that he is a normal human being who cares about growing old. Tonight he is supposed to forget that he is twenty-two and living with unfilled dreams and ambitions and a forgotten part of himself that he broke apart from the moment a Mack-T 18-wheeler collided with his parents Chevy. A scholarship. A girlfriend. College. 

Tonight he is not watching the way the candlelight buries itself into the hollows of his brother’s cheeks – he does not feel anxious or guilty or full of things he will never say. Full of longing for things he cannot have. Marriage. Kids. A house of his own. 

But Darrel Curtis has always been a wonderful liar.

He blows out the candle and makes a wish. 

The room goes dark. Darry closes his eyes.

-

The day after his birthday is spent in quiet solitude, with thoughts drifting between roofing tar and the grey puffs of his coworkers’ cigarettes. Lunch is a pastrami on rye sandwich and a badly wrapped, squished piece of birthday cake that Ponyboy made. The icing is from a can and tastes somewhat gritty. He leaves work at 4, only to drive to a second job for 5. He doesn’t come home until 8 pm. 

When Sodapop catches his brother Darrel washing his hands for the twentieth time in what seems to be like a singular hour, he doesn’t say a word. It happens because he is kind enough to not mention the far off look he gets in his eyes whenever somebody asks him how things are going. How are you liking the new job, Darry? Are you doing okay, Darry? I’m sorry, Darry. 

Things will work out. 

Sodapop stays quiet and tries not to think too hard about his brother or that look he gets - like he’s this close to killing someone, eyes fluttering shut and trying to remember that it was all for something immaculate, something planned and perfect and justifying the means to which he has had to suffer (not just two kid brothers that were dumped on him like last week’s trash.) Eighteen with a scholarship to UCOA and working as a roofer. Settling for silver in so many ways.

Worse, the house now smells like three boys again. Not that his own mother had ever really smelt like anything special, but Darrel’s girlfriend, Rowan—

Sodapop remembers that Rowan always made the furniture smell like sugar and cigarettes. A nauseating mixture of sweet and smoky. You could always tell where she had been sitting – it was there, in the fabric. Nicotine and cotton candy and the spice from Darrel’s cologne. Seeping into the walls and floors and the very constructs of the household. Holding the house together, binding them tightly under some strange veil of perfume in the aftermath of their parents death.

He really liked Rowan. She wasn’t bad, for a girl. But nobody really knows what happened to her. Darry won’t talk about it and the rest of the gang seemed to follow suit.

Still, Sodapop can remember sneaking downstairs on a Friday night and catching Darry half-drunk with his shirt off, kissing Rowan to the tune of the late night 11 o’clock news. 

“I’ll marry you,” his brother had said. 

Rowan had laughed, took a sip of whisky and told Darrel to stop living with the American Dream.

“You can’t do that,” she had whispered through the press of his lips. “People like you...and me...we don’t dream of things like manicured lawns and the white picket fence. Kitchener gas stoves and electric fridges. The wife in three inch heels carrying your cigar. The nuclear family with 2.5 kids the GMC company car.”

“I don’t won’t you in three inch heels, Ro—,”

“No, but you want—,”

“—you.”

Sodapop had caught a glimpse of Rowan’s bra – it wasn’t anything like he had expected it to be; simple and white and so unlike everything else about her. He snuck back up the stairs and thought of different things, like cool Tulsa breeze on quiet May mornings and the seven cuts on his fingers after fighting some know-it-all Soc’ near the Gerry Town Food Bin. He didn't think of Darry or Ro or the glasses of whiskey and coke sitting forgotten on the coffee table. He didn't think of what it would be like if she were to live here. How nice it would be if things were normal again. If there was someone who could actually cook a decent meal without burning it. 

He woke up the next morning and Rowan was gone. He noticed that one of her earrings has left been by the couch – silver and blue tangled in the fibers of the fabric. He showed the piece of jewellery to Darry. Darry looked at it long and hard, but didn't say a word and slipped the trinket into the safety of his jean pockets before slipping quietly away. Sodapop thought she’d come back for it. But she never did.


End file.
